We Can Be Heroes
In 1939, at the age of 27, Sid Kline set sail for Europe, landing in Prague as the Nazis were on the march. The night before their arrival, he stood on a balcony with Czech aristocrats and helped them polish off their best champagne, then smashed the crystal glasses in the courtyard below so nothing would be left for the Nazis.
In the days that followed, Sid, the short-statured son of a Jewish shoe salesman from Camden, New Jersey, visited Berlin, rubbing shoulders with currency smugglers, mercenaries, and his fellow American correspondents. He traveled by train through treacherous border crossings, and smuggled a subversive manuscript penned by a Count into free territory. He returned home to Manhattan to settle down, married my grandmother, and soon after, my mother arrived.
By the time I came along, Sid had lost most of his hair, developed a healthy paunch and a hearty smoker’s laugh, and taken a job as a rewrite man for the New York Daily News, where he wore a rumpled shirt and a green eyeshade, chain-smoked cigars, and spun reports coming in from the far reaches of the world’s greatest city into narrative gold.
Anyone can have a hero’s journey if you think about your life in a new way.
Sid used to tell me he couldn’t imagine a more satisfying life than the one journalism had provided him—the stories he heard, the people he met, the adventures it afforded him. It was a life story that allowed Sid to live out his final years believing himself to be a blessed and grateful man.
I thought of Sid earlier this year when I read the psychology paper, “Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero’s Journey Increases Meaning in Life.” The title struck something inside me I knew to be true. It began with Sid, whose hero’s journey increased meaning in my life—certainly more than the one offered by my other grandfather, a scientist who died far richer and with more renown but lacked Sid’s talent for storytelling. But it’s something I’ve also seen in countless others over the course of a long career traveling far and wide and speaking with people from all walks of life.
Sid’s stories led me to become a journalist. They’re the reason, when I reached my mid 20s, I quit a safe, secure job covering the New Jersey congressional delegation for a regional newspaper in Washington D.C., ignoring the warnings of my older colleagues who suggested my career would never recover. I felt stifled by the background politicking, calculations, and grandiosity of those in official Washington, a bubble where even the most extreme problems and high-stakes stories were somehow made to seem bloodless, bureaucratic, and disembodied from real human drama.
So, at 27, I moved to Cambodia, a raw, traumatized nation still emerging from 30 years of civil war, where everyday life seemed to be a matter of life
